Musings with Cory Grosser

June 2005

So do you try to design things for average people to enjoy?
Not in the sense of democratic design that means I create millions of things that may be sold but forgotten. My designs tend to be more expensive pieces that people save up for. At the same time, I don’t look to do one-offs. Because for me, design is really about production and helping businesses to bring in consumers that respond to a specific design or the feeling or lifestyle it represents or their brand represents. I’m interested in helping a client develop hundreds or thousands of these things and creating a real impact.

What is your sense of good design?
In a technical sense I have a pure sensibility, a pure vision with strict attention to symmetry, scale, and composition. And although I work across different disciplines, I always use the same set of rules. People ask me, ‘How can you design a national ad campaign and design a house at the exact same time?’ I can because I’m attuned to my own sensibilities and use rules of scale, proportion, color. The next facet of my design philosophy is emotional, and visually, it’s two things. To make people feel young, hip, and cool; and, in the business sense, to make a brand young, hip and cool.

What differences do you see in the design disciplines you’ve worked in?
I definitely see design innovation in American homes but there’s not that same kind of risk or progress that I see in the automotive industry. Typical American consumers are still going after reproductions.

What are your dream design jobs?
The three projects I’m chasing right now are a hotel, an airplane, and I’m dying to work with a fashion company on a showroom.

What are you working on now?
[Architect and designer] Sami Hayek and I are building a home in Sedona. We’re given free-reign to design a new home for a new lifestyle, so we’ve designed everything from the smallest details––chairs to dishware to shelves. We’re really thinking about how people live and act and behave inside their home. We work with the owners very carefully in order to translate their needs and desires into the physical.

Have you been exploring new materials for this project?
It is an avant-garde project and we’re still about a year away from having it finished, but the really exciting part of this home isn’t materials, it’s our use of interesting and unique scales. Some designers are constantly exploring new materials. I’m into new material too, but it’s not one of the main things that pushes my work in terms of form, composition and lifestyle. If I’ve conceived of a new form, then I will find a material to create it. I do not try to find new materials and then use them to create a new form.

What about your home, can I guess what it looks like by seeing your work?
Yes. If you come to my house, you see me. If I’m going to say with my work, ‘This is a lifestyle I promote,’ and then not have those pieces or that lifestyle represented in my home, I think that would be kind of hypocritical. I live with a lot of designed items. I even have a lot of prototypes from over the past few years, some that were made and some that weren’t. I like that because it lets me be with those designs for a length of time and I can see what needs improvement or what works really well.

You don’t have a lot of the modern design classics?
Not really. If you think about it, those designs came over 50 years ago. To me, work is about progress and the future. I’m not saying those pieces are not important and influential, groundbreaking designs, but if this work really is about progress and the future, I’m more interested in what’s happening tomorrow and what’s happening 10 days or 10 years from now.

When teaching your design students, what is the most important thing you try to impress on them?
The single most important thing I try to impress on my students is that they need the ability to dream. With that, they can pretty much make whatever they want out of this career, design anything for any interest that you have. If you’re a cyclist, you can design bicycles. Design is this wonderful field that we’re lucky to have fallen into because guidance counselors aren’t telling you that industrial design is an option.